Fine Art Photography

Category Archives: Wordpress

I’ve long wanted a slideshow to showcase some of my work on the front page here. I’ve tried quite a few things and nothing was very easy or worked the way I wanted. As you might be aware, I use WordPress to run this site, and I’m quite happy with that. I wanted something that would play nicely with the WordPress back end. Several plug ins required uploading all new media but I wanted something that could use the existing photos that I’d already uploaded. After much searching and a bit of trial and error, I found Photo Galleria. I’ve been running it here on the splash page for a few days now and it’s worked pretty well.

It was easy to set up. If you’re familiar with WordPress then this will be old hat… I was able to do the install completely through the WP interface, then I set up a photo gallery and got the slideshow running in Preview mode. I’m using the “Twenty Twelve” WordPress theme. I think it’s clean and simple and I like the way it looks. I added a couple lines to the CSS file for this theme, both listed in the FAQ for the Photo Galleria plugin, to change the background color and to center the thumbnails. WordPress has made CSS changes easy to do in recent updates, you just go to Dashboard>Appearance>Editor and you can access the file to make changes. If you’re not familiar with CSS or HTML I would suggest you be careful here, it’s easy to make a mess. I always back up the complete WordPress install and my content before I start tinkering.

When I was finished with the messing about, and I was happy with the way things looked and worked, I published the page I made for the slideshow. I then set that to be my front page here on the site. I set up a second page as the default for the blog and created a link in the menu for that so the blog could still be found. Again, if you’re familiar with WordPress, this is all pretty easy to do. All in all, once I’d settled on the Photo Galleria plugin, everything else was easy to get the way I wanted…

After much thought and consideration, I’ve decided to setup a website for Michael Thorpe Photography here. I decided to utilize WordPress (like I did over at my old blog) for my content management system and as time goes by, I’ll do some tweaking to make the site look the way I want.

Future plans: I’ll add a bit of drivel about me and set up a slideshow or gallery as a front page, and start to utilize this as the new home of my blog.

Well, late again. But well worth the trouble. I figured out a few problems with the WordPress software and the site, enough so I don’t feel it necessary to leave the old splash page up as a wall. I still have a few things I want to do, like rebuild a few of my pages from the old site and load them up, but I can work on that over time. I’m not sure if I’ll try my hand at PHP and all that for those pages, or just stick with the tried and true html… I need to also figure out a way to import old Livejournal entries and keep the comments included…

A few things I’d like to add: a “most recent photos” module and link, a link to a page with some of my commercial work, a link and an ad for my cafepress site, and a few other things from the old site…

Well, I spent a big chunk of the evening last night uploading and then troubleshooting the WordPress software. I finally gave up, put the splash page back up, and went to bed. Most of the problems stemmed from me not being entirely familiar with the software and the process. I suppose I should have done an install on my own computer first as a way of becoming familiar with the program and work out the bugs there.

I like the interface and the software, far more capable and customizable than Blogger and LiveJournal. Blogger wont even allow imports of archives from other journals…

I still have a bit of work to do to get the look I want for the site. I’m still learning about the program. I still have a lot to learn about the underpinnings, the PHP and the MySQL. I hope to get better at both as I work at getting the look I want on the site…